WorkAdventure 1.29 – Quality-of-Life Improvements Across Meetings, Maps, and Onboarding
We’re thrilled to announce that WorkAdventure 1.29.0 is now available. This release brings a wide range of quality-of-life improvements and bug fixes, including the ability to spawn at your personal desk, a revamped onboarding experience, improved meeting invites, lockable meeting rooms, and much more. Read on for the full list of changes.
New Features
Spawn at your personal desk
If you join a map with personal desks configured, you will now spawn at your personal desk instead of the default spawn point. This quality-of-life improvement gets you back to your workspace right away, without the extra walk.
In the past, you could create one start point per personal desk and add #[area-name] to the URL to spawn in that area, but that was not very user-friendly. With this new feature, simply claiming a personal desk is enough to make you spawn there automatically when you join the map.
Also, remember that since 1.28, you can press Ctrl + D at any time to quickly return to your personal desk.
Invite a user to join you in a meeting / wizz
You can now invite another user to join you in a meeting without leaving the meeting room and walking over to them. Just click the user, either on the map or in the user list, then click the new Invite button.
The user will receive a notification with the option to join you. If they click Join, they will automatically walk to the meeting room and join the meeting.
This feature also works as a “wizz”. If the user has set their status to Not available, this is a handy way to get their attention and invite them into the meeting.
Of course, this could be abused by users repeatedly wizzing others. To prevent that, the Invite feature is rate-limited. No spamming allowed.
Lock any area (meeting rooms, etc.)
You can now lock any area of the map, just as you can already lock a bubble.
When locked, the area becomes a collision zone, and players trying to enter it will hit an invisible wall. This is useful for creating private meeting rooms, breakout spaces, or other zones that a group can temporarily claim.
You can optionally define which user tags are allowed to lock and unlock the area. If no tags are specified, any user inside the area can do so.
If someone locks an area and then walks away from their keyboard without unlocking it, any user with the admin tag can unlock it from the outside. This helps prevent areas from staying locked indefinitely.
Note: lockable areas are now the default for all existing and new meeting rooms and podium zones. When upgrading to 1.29, a lockable property is automatically added to those areas. If you do not want this behavior, simply open the map editor, select the area, and delete the lockable property that was added automatically.
Limit the number of users in an area
Similar to the locking feature, you can now define a maximum capacity for any area on the map. Once that capacity is reached, new users trying to enter the area will hit an invisible wall and will not be able to enter until someone leaves.
Meeting attendee list
When you are in a conversation, whether it is a bubble, a meeting room, a conference room, and so on, a new attendee list button appears in the top-right corner of the action bar. Click it to see everyone currently in the conversation. Clicking a name opens that user’s business card, along with contextual actions such as Send a message.
New onboarding experience
The onboarding tutorial, which previously lived in the scripting-api-extra repository, has been revamped and moved into the main repository. It is now more interactive and more deeply integrated into WorkAdventure.
As always, the tutorial can be disabled from the admin dashboard.
Display a warning when no microphone sound is detected
“Hey, can you hear me?”
How many online meetings start with that question? And when the answer is “No”, it can be hard to tell where the problem is coming from. Is it your microphone? The other person’s speakers? The network?
With this new feature, if no sound is detected from your microphone for 3 seconds after you turn it on, a warning is displayed to let you know that your microphone may not be set up properly. This is a quick way to catch and fix audio issues before joining a meeting.
Improvements
Improved recording list design
The recording list popup has been redesigned, and the recording UI has been polished overall.
Chat improvements
The overall chat experience has been polished. File attachments now include a preview, file sharing works correctly, and DM conversations now display the other person’s profile picture.
Bug fixes
A big number of bugs have been fixed in this release. You can get a complete list in the release notes.
What’s next?
We are already working on the next release. Just like 1.29, it will include a wide range of quality-of-life improvements and bug fixes. In addition, we are planning to add an improved noise cancellation feature, which will be particularly useful for users joining from noisy environments. This noise cancellation feature will pave the way for AI features such as automatic transcription and translation of meetings, which are on our roadmap for the next few months.